France is renowned for its excellent filmmakers, but it
isn’t known for its horror films. When considering the very best horror films,
only a couple from France will likely come to mind, and one of those will most
certainly be Georges Franju’s Eyes
without a Face. This grim tale of murder, megalomania, and face transplants
has enough classic horror trappings to entrap classic horror fans (a mad
doctor, extreme grisliness, Gothic imagery) and enough elegance and
intelligence to place it as a specimen of early sixties French cinema.
In America, Eyes
without a Face wasn’t treated with the respect it deserved: edited, dubbed,
retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr.
Faustus, and coupled with a cheapie called The Manster as a double feature for the matinee crowd. In 2004, Eyes without a Face finally received the
stateside respect it deserved when the Criterion Collection released it
restored and in its unadulterated form on DVD. Nine years later, that
restoration literally pales next to Criterion’s most recent Blu-ray
restoration. I tested the previous disc against the new one, and that 2004 DVD
looks washed out compared to the high-contrast Blu-ray restoration. The blacks
are much richer, which is important for a film in which darkness play such a key
role. It’s hard to believe that this beautiful film will ever look more
beautiful.
The extras have mostly been shuttled over from the old DVD,
but the most significant one—Franju’s disturbingly chilly 1949 short
documentary on slaughterhouses Blood of
the Beasts—has been given the same high-def treatment as Eyes without a Face. That’s a true
rarity for a bonus, though it does show its age more than the pristine feature
film. The one new bonus to go along with the other previously released ones
(archival interviews with Franju, the Eyes
without a Face-centric parts of a 1985 documentary about the guys who wrote
it) is an interesting 8-minute interview with star Edith Scob (who still makes
experimental films…check out 2012’s Holy
Motors!). The one extra that did not make the transition from DVD to
Blu-ray is a photo gallery, though many of those pictures appear in the Scob
interview.
